# The &kkbswitch; Handbook

## Introduction

&kkbswitch; is a keyboard layout indicator for &tde;. It is useful when you have configured the XKeyboard extension of your X Server to have more than one keyboard group (layout), for example US/ASCII and Russian. &kkbswitch; displays an icon in the system tray that indicates which layout is currently active. Note that &kkbswitch; does not help you configure XKeyboard, it merely serves as the indicator of the current layout. You still have to configure XKeyboard by editing the `XF86Config` file.

Please report any problems or feature requests to the Trinity Desktop Environment project.

## Using &kkbswitch;

The most basic usage is simply to let it sit in the system tray and show you which keyboard layout is currently active. You can also click the KKBSwicth system tray icon to switch keyboard layouts. When right-clicked, the system tray icon displays a menu with the following entries:

- One or more entries corresponding to the configured keyboard layouts. Note that XKeyboard can have up to 4 layouts configured. The currently active layout will be checked. Selecting a menu entry corresponding to a layout will make that layout active.

- "Configure Keyboard Switch...". This entry lets you configure &kkbswitch;

- "Help". Brings up the online help (probably the document you are reading now).

- "About Keyboard Switch". This entry displays a standard "About" dialog box.

- "Quit". Quit &kkbswitch;.

### Configuring &kkbswitch;

In the &kkbswitch; configuration dialog (invoked by selecting "Configure Keyboard Switch..." from the tray icon's context menu) you will be able to configure various aspects of &kkbswitch;'s behavior. The configuration dialog consits of two pages, General and Shortcuts.

#### The General page

##### Setting the icons corresponding to the available keyboard layouts

The appearance of the system tray icons that represent keyboard layouts depends on the icon style. &kkbswitch; implements the following three styles:

Country flag

- This style displays a country flag corresponding to the currently selected layout. Note that this was the only style in version of &kkbswitch; prior to 1.3.

Language code

- This style displays the two-letter ISO language code corresponding to the currently selected layout. This style mimics &Windows; layout indicator.

Flag and code

- This style displays the language code against the background of a country flag. This style mimics &tde;'s kxkb application.

The following table illustrates the look of &kkbswitch; tray icon menu with different icon styles.

Country flag | Language code | Flag and code

The desired style can be selected in the Layout icon style combo box.

Note that &kkbswitch; will try hard to guess the correct flag and language code based on the name of the keyboard layout (the names are configured in XKeyboard). For example, it will display the US flag and/or "EN" language code for US/ASCII layout, German flag and/or "DE" language code for German layout, Russian flag and/or "RU" language code for Russian layout, etc. If it cannot guess an icon, it will display a "default" icon, which simply shows the layout's number. Use the configuration dialog to customize flag icons: select a layout in the "Available keyboard layouts" listbox and click "Change icon..." button. You will be presented with "Pick icon" dialog box. There you will be able to select from the list of country flag pixmaps that are shipped with &kde;. If you'd like to use a custom image, click the "Browse" button in the bottom of the dialog box and browse for the image file you'd like to use. Note that the preferred size for layout icons is 21 by 14 pixels. If your image has different dimensions, &kkbswitch; will scale it appropriately, but the result might look not very good.

Note that changing the icon is not available for the Language Code style, which does not feature a flag.

If you have specified a custom icon for a layout, you can always go back to the standard icon (the one the &kkbswitch; has guessed) by clicking "Use Default Icon" button. This button will be enabled only when the layout selected in the "Available keyboard layouts" listbox has a custom icon.

##### Specifying default layout

You can mark one of the configured keyboard layouts as the default. The default layout will be activated when &kkbswitch; starts up. To mark a layout as default, simply select the layout in the "Available keyboard layouts" listbox and click "Set as default" button. The default layout's name is shown in boldface in the "Available keyboard layouts" listbox.

##### Specifying layout scope

&kkbswitch; supports three modes of operation with regards to the scope of the active keyboard layout. Possible settings are:

All windows

- In this mode the active layout applies to all windows on your desktop. In other words, at any given time all windows use the same layout.

Windows of one application

- In this mode the active layout applies to windows one application

  A technically inclined user familiar with &X-Window; API would be interested to know that &kkbswitch; considers windows that have the same Window Class (from WM_CLASS property) as belonging to the same application.

  . In other words, each application has its own active layout. When a window gets focused, KKBSwitch automatically shows the active layout of this window's application in the system tray. When you change the active layout, either by pressing XKeyboard's group switch key, or by clicking KKBSwitch's tray icon, or by using its context menu, this change affects only the currently active application. Other applications retain their layouts.

One window

- In this mode the active layout applies to the focused window only. In other words, each window has its own active layout. When a window gets focused, KKBSwitch automatically shows this window's active layout in the system tray. When you change the active layout, either by pressing XKeyboard's group switch key, or by clicking KKBSwitch's tray icon, or by using its context menu, this change affects only the currently focused window. Other windows retain their layouts.

Pick the mode that you prefer in the "Layout applies to" combo box. The author's opinion is that "Windows of one application" is the most reasonable choice, but opinions vary.

Note that in "Windows of one application" and "One window" modes, all new windows start up with the default layout. In "All windows" mode new windows start with the active (global) layout.

##### Using "Toggle Mode"

"Toggle mode" is a convenient feature of &kkbswitch;, which is useful if you have more than 2 layouts. When "Toggle mode" is on, pressing the XKeyboard's group switch key or clicking &kkbswitch;'s tray icon will toggle between the two most recently used layouts. To activate the third or the fourth (if available) layout you'll need to right-click &kkbswitch;'s tray icon and select the desired layout from the menu or use keyboard shortcuts (see shortcuts). For example, I have US/ASCII, Russian and Ukrainian layouts configured. Most of the time I use either US/ASCII or Russian layout and switch back and forth between them without activating the rarely needed Ukrainian layout. But sometimes I need to write something in Ukrainian, so I select this layout from the tray icon's menu.

To turn the "Toggle mode" on and off use the Use "Toggle Mode" checkbox in the configuration dialog.

When "Toggle mode" is on, the two most recently used layouts will be marked with an asterisk in the &kkbswitch; tray icon's menu.

##### Starting &kkbswitch; automatically when you log in

Use "Autostart" checkbox to enable &kkbswitch; autostart feature. When this checkbox is on, &kkbswitch; will start automatically each time you log in to &kde;. Note that this is independent of &kde;'s session restoration feature. If you configure &kde; to restore the previous session on login (under &kde; Components | Session Manager in &kcontrolcenter;), and &kkbswitch; was running in your previous session, &kde; will restore &kkbswitch; in the new session regardless of the autostart setting.

#### The Shortcuts page

&kkbswitch; allows you to quickly activate particular layouts with keyboard shortcuts. This is configured at the Shortcuts page. The "Use shortcuts to activate keyboard layouts" checkbox allows to turns the shortcut feature on and off. Uncheck the checkbox if you don't want to use shortcuts at all. If the checkbox is checked, the shortcuts are enabled. You can configure what key combinations activate which layouts at the key chooser pane under the checkbox. This is a standard &kde; key chooser widget that should be familiar to you from other &kde; applications. The default shortcuts are: Ctrl Alt 1 to activate the first layout, Ctrl Alt 2 the activate the second one, etc.

#### How &kkbswitch; guesses icons for keyboard layouts

&kkbswitch; uses the name of the keyboard layout, as defined by XKeyboard, to guess the icon to represent it. The process is entirely automatic; this section is only for those who want to tweak how this guessing works or just are curious. The algorithm is very simple. The &kkbswitch; distribution contains a file named `group_names`, which resides in &kkbswitch;'s data directory (`$`TDEDIR`/share/apps/kkbswitch`). The file is a standard &kde; config file. It contains two sections. The secion named "Mapping" contains mappings from XKeyboard group names to country codes. It contains various key=value pairs, key being the name of the XKeyboard layout and value the two-letter country code of the flag to display. The second section, "Language" contains similar mappings from XKeyboard group names to language codes. Note that if a group name is not found in the "Language" section, it is looked up in "Mapping" section, thus only layouts where country code and language code do not coincide need to be listed in "Language" section (e.g. for US/ASCII group the country code would be "us", but the language code would be "en").

Once the country-code has been determined, &kkbswitch; will look for an icon named `flag.png` in the directory `$`TDEDIR`/share/locale/l10n/`country code`` for icons styles that feature a flag and use the language code for styles that feature the a language code.

As I was told, in &RedHat; 9 systems, the &kde; default country flag icons are missing. To work around that, if &kkbswitch; cannot find country flag icons in the location specified above, it will look for GNOME's gkb icons in `/usr/share/pixmaps/gkb`. Unfortunately, gkb icons have size 40x60, while &kde; ones are 21x14. Thus &kkbswitch; rescales gkb icons on the fly, and the quality of the resulting images leaves a lot to be desired. But still it's better than nothing.

Of course, you can override the flag icon selection algorithm by specifying the icon you want to use, as described in specifying-icons.

## Developer's Guide to &kkbswitch;

&kkbswitch; can be manipulated programmatically via DCOP. It exports an interface named `KBSwitchIntf`. The interface offers the following methods.

    int getNumKbdGroups

This method returns the number of configured keyboard groups (layouts).

    ASYNC selectNextGroup

This method does the same thing as clicking on the &kkbswitch;'s tray icon, i.e. makes the next keyboard layout active. If in "toggle mode", toggles between the two recently used ones, just like clicking on the tray icon does.

    ASYNC selectGroup
    int groupno

This method makes the layout whose number is `groupno` active (like selecting a layout from the tray icon popup menu).

    TQStringList getGroupNames

This method returns the list of the keyboard layout names, as configured in XKeyboard.

### Examples

The following examples illustrate how one can manipulate &kkbswitch; with the command line tool `dcop`.

Select the next keyboard group (layout):

    % dcop kkbswitch KBSwitchIntf selectNextGroup

Select the group (layout) number 0:

    % dcop kkbswitch KBSwitchIntf selectGroup 0

## Credits and License

&kkbswitch;

Program copyright 2001-2004 Leonid Zeitlin lz@europe.com

Contributors:

- Mikhail Senin m_senin@mail.ru - implemented configuration for the default layout and per-window layouts

- Rashid N. Achilov achilov@granch.ru - made a FreeBSD port, suggested "Browse" button in "Pick icon" dialog box.

- Vadim Kriklivy analitic@vinnitsa.com - suggested "Language code" icon style (a la &Windows;) and shortcuts feature, made Ukrainian translation.

- Sergey V Turchin zerg@altlinux.org - implemented autostart feature.

- Stergios Dramis sdramis@egnatia.ee.auth.gr - contributed Greek translation.

- Michal Šulek reloadshot@atlas.sk - contributed Slovak translation.

- Shlomi Loubaton shlomister@gmail.com - contributed manpage, Debian package maintainer.

- Igal aka "Koala" igalfr@netvision.net.il - contributed Hebrew translation, Gentoo ebuild maintainer.

- Petko Yotov 5ko@free.fr - contributed Bulgarian translation.

- Michal Bukovský michal@trilogic.cz - contributed Czech translation.

Documentation copyright 2001-2005 Leonid Zeitlin lz@europe.com

&underFDL; &underGPL;

## Installation

### How to obtain &kkbswitch;

&kkbswitch; is part of the Trinity Desktop Environment project: http://trinitydesktop.org. Check there for the latest news.

### Requirements

&kkbswitch; doesn't require any special environment to compile and run besides the standard &tde; tdelibs and tdebase.

### Compilation and Installation

&kkbswitch; relies on cmake to build, please read the INSTALL file.

If you system uses RPM you may want to download &kkbswitch; source RPM package. To build a binary RPM out of source RPM run this command (as root):

    % rpmbuild --rebuild kkbswitch-&kkbswitchVersion;-1.src.rpm

(You may add `--with ru_ua_layout` option if you need the Russian/Ukrainian layout file, see ru_ua). Then, still as root, go to your binary RPM directory (on &RedHat; Intel systems, `/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386`) and install the binary RPM you've just built with this command:

    % rpm -ihv kkbswitch-&kkbswitchVersion;-1.i386.rpm

Note that with older versions of RPM you will need to use command ``rpm` `--rebuild`` instead of ``rpmbuild` `--rebuild``

## The Russian/Ukrainian keyboard layout file

For the benefit of Ukrainian users of &kkbswitch; and XFree86 versions before 4.3, a Russian/Ukrainian keyboard layout file is included with the distribution (users of XFree86 4.3 and later, including X.Org server, read the note in the end of this appendix). This file is experimental, so report any problems with it to the author of &kkbswitch;. The file is named `ru_ua` and by default gets installed to the directory `/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols`, where this type of XKeyboard configuation file is supposed to go. The file defines a configuration with 3 keyboard groups (layouts): US/ASCII, Russian and Ukrainian. To use this layout, you can do one of the following.

1. If you feel comfortable editing your `XF86Config` file and know its structure you can simply edit the file (usually `/etc/X11/XF86Config-4` for XFree86 4.x), and in InputDevice section for keyboard set XkbLayout option to "ru_ua". It is recommented to set XkbVariant to "winkeys", since only this variant was tested.

2. If you are using &RedHat; &Linux;, you may create a file named `.Xkbmap` in your home directory and write the text "ru_ua" (without quotes) in it. The default X session startup script will pick this file and activate the layout named in it.

3. Run the command ``setxkbmap` ru_ua` either manually from command prompt our in one of your X session startup script.

Users of XFree86 4.3 and later versions, including X.Org server, don't need any additional files if they want a three-language layout. Just specify `XkbLayout "us,ru,ua"` in your `XF86Config` (`xorg.conf` for X.Org server) file.

&documentation.index;